Hi everyone. Our group is making good progress with our skin color reader. We now have a working prototype that uses led's and photocells to read the color of human skin. Arduino returns the values of the photocells for Red Red(will be a Green led) and Blue. The prototype says my fair skin (Greg's) has a value of 120 red, 40 Blue. Brians much darker skin returns a value of 40 red, 10 Blue. I am happy with our simple approach to doing something relatively complex.
The plan is to have RGB and Yellow leds in the future reading, so four values are returned to wiring to better guess skin color. My only worry is that it may be too precise for our machine that should get it wrong at times.
Now I am planning to create a soldered board for our led's, so that it can withstand touching and use. We are also planning the box for the arduino and how we will get people to interact with our project.
i think this is working out. sounds like a good concept. what will your interface look like?
ReplyDeleteI think it's pretty cool that you're able make this work from just the basic sensors. How sensitive will it be when it's completed? Will it be able to detect variations within people of the same "race" or will it produce broad results and only assign a small number of possibilities?
ReplyDeletelooks like you got the tech working pretty well, but i am concerned about your concept. I feel that the piece will read as a commentary on how people are categorized based on skin color...which i feel is a little two simple and obvious. Why is a machine doing this? what does having a machine tell you your skin color/race mean to the viewer? I feel that there are more interesting ideas in this piece, but are you expressing them in the best possible way? Ultimately I worry that this piece will just tell me that I am different from some one else because of the color of our skin...I dont think that in itself is all that compelling.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see the programming is going so well. As for interface I'm thinking a glove might make a good one since it invites people to wear them and, depending on how thick it is, it could hide or hold the circuitry for the arduino.
ReplyDeleteAnother interface could be like a hand scanner? You could make one of your own design and use old circuit boards and whatnot to give an authentic feel to it. Go t a Goodwill and look for stuff you could take apart maybe.
You could even go simpler and use legos to create this super serious object which could emphasize the ridiculousnous of the entire census. You're making these machines which are determining exactly what people are but you're not even using serious equipment sort of thing. I don't know, but I feel like what your interface is can highly compliment and bring out the conceptual aspects of your piece. So I would decide for sure what aspect of racism you're reacting to and bring that out through the interface.